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Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off world colonies and fight in planetary wars. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Rutger Hauer escapes back to Earth in their personal quest to gain more time to live, burnt-out cop Harrison Ford is hauled into his old precinct, argued back into blade runner service to hunt down the rogue replicants. Along the way Harrison Ford is introduced to Sean Young. A replicant of Dr. Tyrell's daughter. Harrison Ford & Sean Young develop a relationship of admiration and trust in the lonely world they live in.
The first thing you have to understand about movies back before DVDs were invented. Movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars, Rocky, Close Encounters, JAWS, The Shinning, 2001, etc... were in the movie theaters for months and in some cases years. If I remember correctly JAWS, Rocky and Star Wars were shown in theaters for three to four years! Movies were not produced straight to DVD within months of their release. Movies were not available to stream weeks after their release. Movies in some cases took years to produce and stayed in the theaters equally as long. I think it is safe to say that the Rocky Horror Picture Show owns the crown for the movie that never left the theater.
Sequels & the modern-day reboot. Should sequels stay faithful to the original? When is it safe to reboot an original movie concept? IMO, if a movie has had enough sequels that the original plot ideas have been thoroughly worked then I would say it is probably safe to reboot. To reboot an original movie concept based on a singular movie shows the audience an arrogant grappling for idea control. Sadly, this is what I feel has happened to one of my all-time favorite movies growing up Blade Runner. Coming from my understanding of the original plot, sub plots, lore, setting, atmosphere and the soundtrack, Blade Runner 2049 was a total wreck of a sequel to the original 1982 movie. Blade Runner 2049 does reflect a setting that is the result of a global war or environmental catastrophe, but that is about it. Blade Runner 2049 seems more hell bent on making an Ai statement and exploring some very abstract android concepts. You could almost say we have three Blade Runners stories before us to compare: Philip K Dick's book, the 1982 movie & the 2017 movie.
Let us start by taking in an opinion from the author Philip K Dick and his book "Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep" that the movie Blade Runner is based off.
Philip K Dick enthused to Ridley Scott that the world created for the film looked exactly as he had imagined it in his book. Philip said, "I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for Blade Runner on the news. I recognized it immediately. It was the world as I had imagined it. They caught it perfectly." Philip also approved of the film's script, saying: "After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel."
Regrettably Philip K Dick did not live to see the theatrical release of Blade Runner but at least for a moment you could say he was pleased with what he saw being developed. Though after a careful read of his story I found his story to be a rather comic version to the rather detailed setting structured for the 1982 movie.
In Dick's original plot, a global war has occurred somewhere around the year 1992 that rendered Earth's atmosphere highly radioactive, most animal species are now endangered or extinct. As a result, owning real animals has become a fashionable and expensive status symbol, while poor people can only afford realistic electric robotic imitations of animals. The goal of owning a real goat to replace the electronic sheep that Deckard's wife Iran has is the primary driver in the book. Deckard will go on to eliminate the defiant androids that have escaped to earth from mars in the financial pursuit to obtain a real goat for his wife. I am happy to support the developed plot that Ridley Scott's production team greatly improved upon the original story.
The original 1982 movie takes place in the year 2019* though not directly referenced it is suspect that a global war or environmental event has occurred somewhere in the past twenty years, rendering Earth's atmosphere damaged. Over population seems to be an issue in the 1982 movie and that due to these factors people are encouraged to move to off-world colonies. Genetic manufacturing and bio engineering appear to be two forms of occupation relatively available to the common man in this 2019 setting. In Ridley Scott's 1982 movie we find bioengineers at the street level vending manufactured animals, employed genetic engineers manufacturing mutant humans and this common practice of bioengineering goes all the way up to the Tyrell corporation full scale manufacturing of human replicants. That replicants were manufactured by humans to travel off-world (out into space) to help establish other planetary colonies, work as slaves to human colonizers, engage in industrial mining and played an active role in the military. At some point in the space colonizing theater an interplanetary war breaks out to which the replicants play a significant role in fighting. As depicted in the opening 1982 Blade Runner script, "after a bloody mutiny by a nexus 6 combat team, replicants were declared illegal under penalty of death". Harrison Ford's character is quickly described in the movie as having been already an experienced android bounty hunter, therefor we can only assume that prior to 2019, Deckard hunted down androids within earth's society. That he was part of a developed division within the police called the Blade Runners that these deputized assassins had the sole mission of eradicating android replicants from society. We also come to understand that Deckard was previously able to identify replicants administering the Voight-Kampff test in somewhere around 50 questions, now that the newer replicants require far more questions to identify. What this tells us about the lore is that androids looked human and that capillary response tests were required to help identify these android human look-alikes. Rachel at the Tyrell corporation even wants to know if Deckard has ever retired a human in mistake. Which also reveals to us a past event where Blade Runners were hunting down human look-alike androids, identifying them and then eradicating them. Deckard himself even experiences "The Shakes" as a result of the mental trauma or PTSD from having to kill human like androids. So all of this points to a setting in the Blade Runner lore, of thirty plus years where Androids are no longer considered a good thing and are certainly not a welcome part of society.
The 2017 sequel basically brushes all of this to the side. The audience is now to accept a world in environmental collapse, where not only are human androids' are part of society but that human androids are employed to hunt down replicants. Then we have this extremely drawn-out part of the sequel that wants to delve into the possibility that replicant androids have the potential to conceive hybrid offspring after having intercourse with human subjects. There is the edge of insanity and then there is the abyss where obviously the authors to this Blade Runner sequel have taking a dive into. I am a father of two daughters, I understand and love the act of conception, but I will promise you stories about conception just don't fare well in the movie theater. Once you know that this sequel is in part contemplating the idea of whether or not a human and an android can conceive a child, the chances of watching this sequel again have greatly diminished. I don't want to see a movie where Barbi, King Kong or Godzilla have a baby let alone a robot. It's just not movie entertainment. I have watched Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner probably over 100+ times. For the sake of penning this blog I forced myself to watch Blade Runner 2049 a second time. Yep, it's that bad. The execution of Sean Young's character was the icing on the cake. Such a pivotal and important character to the original movie blown away was a statement to me that said forget about the original Blade Runner. A total disregard for Harrison Ford's character and the drama that was presented in the original. There are so many other sloppy nuances in this sequel that I really think it should be called a reboot. It's hinges its identity as a sequel to what? The collapsing earth environment?? It is so depressing that Denis Villeneuve was given this film over Ridley Scott. Villeneuve must ultimately be handed the blame for this waste of a movie, that no Blade Runner fan is going to watch recursively. Denis, the Blade Runner movie is a detective story, take all the future setting away and it's nothing but a great detective story. What didn't you get?
Why were the androids deemed illegal? Was there an android response that conflicted with the humans prior to 2019? and why was there a war occurring somewhere in space? are some of the questions that remain unanswered in the 1982 Blade Runner Lore.
There is a final point of conflict I have with this sequel and it's with the Hans Zimmer Soundtrack. The original 1982 Blade Runner movie didn't do that well with audience back them and gained more of a cult following as time went on. Half of the long-term fans of the film were musicians that seriously connected with the Vangelis soundtrack. In time the Vangelis soundtrack and its bluesy-eerie space melodies performed on the Yamaha CS-80 became legend. There was a time around 1995 where the conversation about the Blade Runner movie was more about the Vangelis soundtrack and the Yamaha CS-80. Still to this day I can divert a Blade Runner fan conversation back into a Vangelis audio conversation. The Vangelis soundtrack became just as important as the movie, and in some circles more. The Vangelis Yamaha CS-80 conversation became integral to the movie concept conversation, and it is very apparent that Hans Zimmer was never in touch with this fact. I can only think from the flimsy soundtrack he composed for this film that not only was he never in touch with the work of Vangelis, but he also didn't even listen to the previous soundtrack before composing this new one. Hans Zimmer & his sidekick Benjamin Wallfish composed 20 tracks of for the most part the same synth pad. I mean drone pad boring with no melodic development or compositional diversity between the tracks. I have posted a link to the Hans Zimmer Blade Runner Bummer of a musical work and after that link a full YouTube embed to just a singular part of the Vangelis masterpiece. The sultry synth character of this beautiful, lonely melody is what won over half of the audience back when and was an overlooked element of the Blade Runner 2049 movie. Sad! Just Sad!! That Hans Zimmer was given such an opportunity to explore the melodic binding of synth to a movie and instead presented a composition void of any musical connection. Sad!!!
The Hans Zimmer Blade Runner Bummer Soundtrack : (
The Vangelis Blade Runner Masterpiece!
* There were so many movies and TV shows produced between 1970-1990 that predicted a future way more developed than our real-world future. Developments in technology, discovery, politics and global events move at much slower speed. Can't help but wonder if this fast future prediction in movies started with On the Beach (the 1959 movie that predicted WW3 in 1964).
this blog entry is a work in progress, to be continued...
